That's why I'd prefer a search engine that was not using AWS, or Yahoo. Too many needless dependencies.

Out of curiousity I'm starting a counter today. Will post something when this IP addr fails. Feel free to take a guess how long it will be used by DDG.

And when it does change, if ever, I have a one line shell script that uses ed to remove entries from files, so all it takes to add a new IP addr to HOSTS is typing

    ed-script-name domain-name /etc/hosts
    echo aa.bb.cc.dd domain-name >> /etc/hosts

In my opinion, the usefulness of a website is inversely proportional to the frequency with which it changes IP addresses.

For example, the IP address for HN rarely changes.

But feel free to keep looking it up in DNS every day. Just in case.

If there are problems with DNS, most users will probably not remember the IP address for HN and will not be able to read the stories.

Meanwhile, the user that stores IP addresses as a backup will have no such problems.